4/7/2009: Thoughts While Sitting in Jury Duty and Reading Pirandello's "Henry IV"

How is it possible to live in a world where it is impossible to know? This must be the great question of drama in the 21st century. The theatre today must not simply try to present new knowledges or arguments without acknowledging that all stable meaning is inherently impossible (this is most “social” or “political” drama). Nor must it take as it entire task to deconstruct the possibility of stable meaning, to destroy the comforts we find in knowledge/meaning, without simultaneously acknowledging and accounting for the suffering that being bereft of the chance for meaning causes. This is the flaw of much of the late avant-garde — cf. Richard Foreman’s Astronome. The twenty-first century theatre must inhabit both sides of this dilemma and articulate a way through without denying need or potential.

“There is no theory, but you have to have a theory” is the best articulation of the position of the new theatre that I am yearning for. A theatre that knows the former and also the latter.

For that matter it must be the position of the new journalism, the new art, the new filmmaking, the new music, the new criticism, the new theory, and, certainly, the new philosophy. This should be the project of the 21st century, and maybe beyond—newly enlightened, can we rebuild a new world out of the ashes of the old without simply rehashing the old forms of ignorance?

If Nietzsche’s “God” is finally and irrevocably, or almost irrevocably dead, then, in a way, the project of modernity (from Copernicus forward) is nearing its completion. Hence, perhaps, our instinctive sense of impending apocalypse. Because the question is—what now? And there has never been a more urgent time for our civilization to ask such a question.

The theatre has a special place because it is the place where illusion and truth, flesh and knowledge, and all the contradictions of modern existence are given bodily form. This is why Pirandello was attracted to the theatre. Because there, we have always faced these darkest and most important questions of our time (as we still do in church), and we must return to the theatre to face these questions, to reckon with these dark truths, all over again.

Those who point the way (or, writers who care about this conflict):
Shakespeare
Nietzsche
Chekhov
Pirandello
Kushner
(the Attic Tragedians?)
(O’Neill’s last plays?)